I entered the university at the height of the movement against the Vietnam War, which included its share of civil disobedience. I also once faced arrest but somehow managed to negotiate an understanding with the university administration (with ninety minutes to spare before carrying out our protest action, which had been previously declared illegal). For this reason I can understand the young people who briefly occupied the Communist Party headquarters and demanded the Communist Party be banned. I agree with them that Communism here deserves to be treated the same way Nazism was in postwar West Germany. Still, anyone who has read anything on civil disobedience knows that a person who takes such a course has to be prepared to take the consequences the law provides for. In this case the consequences are pretty harsh: long years of hard time in a country where the prison diet is not exactly ample or particularly tasty. In this case, if the judge decides to throw the book at them these young people will suffer far out of proportion to what they did. The punishment should fit the crime, and if the law is enforced to the letter, it would simply not.
I think these young people were wrong in deciding to pull such a silly stunt, which is unlikely to do anything to damage the Communist Party of Ukraine. They have been much better advised to sit in the library, get their degrees, and get involved in politics as a number of my former students have, and not without some success. Or they might get involved in business, helping create the social basis for the reform this country needs so badly. They do not need a few years in a penal colony when they could be doing so much more for their country.
One of the eternal prerogatives of youth is the right to be wrong, and these wrongheaded youngsters with their gas canisters and threats of arson messed up royally. Still, I hope that the guardians of law and order (here ladies of extremely easy virtue) will find some way to convict what are really a group of pranksters on a lesser charge. They deserve a week or so in the hoosegow to reconsider their folly, but their crime does not require the years the law provides for. Let us hope that when the case comes to trial, justice will be mitigated by mercy. But in Ukraine I would not bet on it. My nextdoor neighbor comes from the village and served a year and a half for stealing a piglet from a collective farm in a country where those who steal hundreds of millions can buy Parliament wholesale. Go figure.
